Annie Leonard spent a decade researching where our consumer stuff comes from, how its made, who it effects, and where it ends up. Among the results is a 20min. video, The Story of Stuff (also in chapters on YouTube), made by Free Range Studios, the same folk who exposed The Meatrix.
via Puddles of Thought.
Another Long Haul Productions (Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister) song/story extravaganza on NPR ATC, with an original song written for the radio piece by Tim Fite:
This morn on NPR the Western Folklife Center’s What’s in a Song series caught the core of Greg Keeler’s “Coyotes and Cowboy’s” (4:03 mp3):
Greg is a long-time fren, composer of several songs for our radio work, and pollutes young minds at our local MSU-Bozeman.
Had some visitors here in the ‘hood. This message and photo came in from my neighbor (Thanks, Debbie)…
This is one of the 2 cougar kits that was roaming our neighborhood. This one found refuge in our window well until Fish and Game came and got him. What a beautiful animal.
Oldie, but a web classic (originally a Flash creation by dunno-who), “End of Ze World”:
Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places, a moose near Big Sky, Montana (don’t know photographer):
We at HV occasionally explore science reporting. A post on the new blog Wallet Mouth (on consumer tools– buycotts & boycotts) links to a study which contends walking has a heavier carbon footprint than driving: Amuse-bouche: walking the walk. It also links to the reasons this s’pose-they’re-serious study is pure nonsense. Both point out the ways partial presentations of facts n’ figs can mislead.
(Wallet Mouth is writ by the better half of the quiet american radio family.)
Turning on the news yesterday I couldn’t help notice that LA is on fire…again. All my life it seems LA has been on fire–in one way or another. Floods, fires, mudslides, celebrity antics and the slow disaster of constant traffic—a theme park of natural, and un-natural, disasters. I’m not too worried when I see Southern California’s flirtation with the apocalypse continuing, because I know it’s prepared. I’ll never forget, growing-up in North Hollywood, all the preparedness drills we went through in school.
More…
The Nature Conservancy’s Nature Stories podcast features a bike-mic collage, produced by Emily Botein, of my two-wheeled self-propelled roadtrips. From Stories from the Heart of the Land, “Biking the Back Roads” (10:05 mp3):
KPBS-FM has made a Google Map for wildfire updates in the San Diego area. And here’s Los Angeles wildfire updates from the LA Times. Both are linked from the maps.google front.
The Nature Conservancy’s Nature Stories podcast has Scott Carrier’s piece, from Stories from the Heart of the Land, on circling the sacred Tibetan “Mount Kailash” (20:26 mp3):
Prez GW Bush (Will Farrell) on Global Warming:
The Pinky Show, “Ant- Light Pollution:”
AARP Prime Time Radio has posted a photo-audio gallery of Gordon Hempton’s Sounds of Silence. Hempton is aka Sound Tracker , “an international acoustic ecologists,” and instigator of the One Square Inch project.
TouchRadio is the webcast (iTunes subscribe) of Touch Records, the label of field recordists and audio artists, including Chris Watson. Try one— step into this “9-Sided Room,” by Steve Roden (27:00):
Producers Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann interview and inventively sound-portray Steve Quinn of NYC’s American Museum of Natural History interview w/ producers). From the Stories from the Heart of the Land series, in the episode The Nature of the Imagination, “A Window in Time” (4:12 mp3):
Exquisite field recordist (and ex-Cabaret Voltaire band member) Chris Watson has new site up with news, bio, and downloads.
Form Touch Sampler 3, Chris Watson, “Out of Our Sight” (2:59 mp3):
“Motionless anticipation, along the dry sandy banks of the Zambesi a Mozambique nightjar is sucking in all the remaining light.”
This week’s HV cast: The last half of A Hot & Dry Summer Special, hosted by Ben Adair of APM Weekend America: The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada’s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more of Bernie Krause’s Desert Solitudes. A special from Hearing Voices, “Desert Air 2- of 2” (29:00 mp3):
This week’s HV cast: The first half of A Hot & Dry Summer Special, hosted by Ben Adair of APM Weekend America: Coyotes, owls, frogs and songbirds are part of Desert Solitudes, recorded by Bernie Krause and Ruth Happel in the Sonoran and Chihuauan deserts, part of New Mexico’s panhandle. Host Ben Adair heads down to the ghost towns, Opera Houses, century-old abandoned mines, and billion-year old boulders along Death Valley’s “Mojave Road.” And Kraut-rockers Faust dial in “Long Distance Calls in the Desert,” from their album Rien. A special from Hearing Voices, “Desert Air 1- of 2” (23:00 mp3):
The new Nature Conservancy/Visa-funded radio series, Stories from the Heart of the Land, is out (producers: Jay Allison & Emily Botein; music: Bill Frisell). Lotsa talented indies contributed pieces, including several of us from HV — Ann & Kara, Scott, me. Here’s a taste, Kitchen Sisters, “Cry Me A River” (16:39):
Stations: the series is free at PRX.